RESIDENTE SIN LUZ ELECTRICA POR MAS DE 12 DIAS

[tsimons]

Hola Marcos,
Queremos ayudarte con tu problema de la energía eléctrica. Puedes darme el número del reporte y a donde has puesto el reclamo.
Veré si puedo obtener el nombre del funcionario y a que e-mail se le puede enviar este reporte y después voy a solicitarle todas las personas del forum que llamen y además envien un e-mail a esa dirección denunciando el pésimo servicio que están brindandote (más de 12 días sin electricidad!). Podría pasarle a cualquiera! Nuestra comunidad debe solidarizarse con este tipo de problemas.
Terani Simons

[Marco]

Yes, our electricity has been restored after being out of service for 12 days. On Thursday, October 25th at 5 AM, a large tree on the neighboring lot fell across our cul-de-sac, pulling down the power and telephone cables and blocking our driveway. The streetlight was also destroyed. As I wrote in an earlier post, the Vistamares crew arrived around 8am and by 10am had the street clear so we would be able to drive through. It was an impressive sight to see 6 men make such quick work of such a big mess.

I notified the garita of the incident immediately after it occurred, and recall something being said about ENSA. I was hoping the guard would call ENSA but wasn't sure all that was communicated, so I made my own call to ENSA a bit later that morning (800-9111). The automated line gave us our first technical report number for a service call. Over the next few days we could see that someone had been by to inspect and clean up a few bits of debris, including the broken streetlight housing. The garita and the oficina both assured us that ENSA was aware of our predicament. Fortunately we had purchased a generator the week before and were able to keep the refrigerators running, so we didn't lose any food.

Friends generously invited us to do laundry at their house and to get internet access when the generator wasn't running. Another friend said that they have waited for ENSA up to 10 days when the trouble was confined to a single residence, as was our case.

We did make more telephone calls to the status number to see when they would come to do the work. Invariably we were told the crew would be arriving that day or the next. When they didn't show we made more calls and got 2 more technical report numbers for service. A few days into the outage we visited the ENSA office in La Doña. The attendant had a record of our phone calls and work order, and she was sympathetic, but admitted that even though ours had been a long wait, a single house was not their highest priority. However she also assured us that a crew was scheduled to restore our service "el día de hoy". On another day, Gonzalo (who helps us with the yard work) offered to call ENSA for us. We hoped that a native Spanish-speaker might have more influence with them. But it was the same result - they assured him that they had somebody scheduled to restore our service that day or the following morning. Yet again, nobody showed up.

We got into a groove running the generator a few hours in the morning, then in the late afternoon/evening as darkness fell. The November holiday weekend approached and it was obvious the crew would not be coming until after the weekend.

We were happy to discover that Colon Day is not a holiday for everyone; the sub-contractor crew for ENSA appeared just before noon that day (Monday, November 5th.) In about 2 hours they had the cable restrung and I disconnected the generator. The voltage meter read correctly at the main breaker box and the crew departed.

Once again we were reminded how very dependent we are on a steady supply of electricity. If we had not bought the generator just a few days before the outage, we would have done so the day the tree fell. Now we feel prepared to handle the increasingly frequent (but generally far shorter than a day or 12) power outages easily.

Thanks to all who offered their support.